Hopefully, the light is not shining on the cover when I do that too much.

Walking the Perfect Square is the first book in the Moe Prager Mystery Series by Reed Farrel Coleman. And there’s all these stories I could tell you about Reed Farrel Coleman. He’s a really great, funny guy. I mean, as a person, he is tops. And so nice. I met him at Deadly Ink. This was way back before I had my stroke, because I was in a touch football game with him and Steve Hamilton, Jim Fusilli [I spelled it wrong in the video captions. Sorry, Jim], and my friend, Jack Bludis, who’s a writer also. And we had the best time. It was so much fun, but here’s the thing.

I found out during that Deadly Ink conference about Walking the Perfect Square, which was, like I said, his first Moe Prager novel. So I was curious and I decided to get it. And I so fell in love with the character of Moe Prager. He’s a cop who retired basically on disability, because of a freak accident. And that’s something I can kind of understand and relate to in a sense, but he ends up becoming a private eye, even though he’s opened a wine business — beer and wine? — maybe, it’s just wine — with his brother. He can’t help but to keep being drawn back into the world of crime solving, And he’s a wonderfully complex and interesting character.

And Reed Farrel Coleman, since this book came out, has gone on to win every award imaginable, short of the Pulitzer. And I’m waiting for that. Someday Reed will get the Pulitzer. Just wait. Anyway, his Moe Prager series is wonderful. It starts in the past — I can’t remember what year — but then, it flashes forward to what was the present day. And his series basically follows the arc from that past to the present day. And it’s just brilliant.

And I can’t say enough good things about both this series and about Reed Farrel Coleman, who now is doing ghostwriting, I guess, in a very literal sense almost, for Robert Parker. He is now writing Robert Parker’s books. And he’s achieved some fantastic things, and I just want to say, thank you Reed Farrel Coleman, for being such a great writer and such a great person. And he’s very inspiring and has inspired me, along with so many other crime writers.